Hide and Seek

Tricks and treachery in “Sly Fox” and “Sarah, Sarah.”

Volpone, whom Ben Jonson claimed to have invented in five weeks in 1606, is the kind of con man who would steal your stove, then come back for the smoke. A harbinger of the rise of both capitalism and individualism, he has proved to be one of the theatre’s most durable messengers of a third ism: cynicism. For Volpone, a man who can’t see a belt without hitting below it, Homo sapiens is Homo sap. Pretending to be heirless and at death’s door, he uses the legend of his wealth to extort all sorts of capital from the greedy souls around him. A connoisseur of the craven, he gets a sadistic thrill not just from grand larceny but from grand humiliation: he doesn’t want wealth alone; he wants to watch its power corrupt.

In our current climate of avarice, the director Arthur Penn and the playwright Larry Gelbart decided to crank up their 1976 Broadway fun machine “Sly Fox,” based on “Volpone” (at the Barrymore), to see if it would still fly. They installed a new comic engine—the puckish Richard Dreyfuss as Foxwell J. Sly—and several new sparkplugs, including Bronson Pinchot as Lawyer Craven, Peter Scolari as the Chief of Police, and Professor Irwin Corey as the Court Clerk. Nonetheless, the show takes some time to get airborne. The first and most glaring impediment to liftoff is the miscasting of Eric Stoltz as Simon Able, Sly’s sidekick and shill. Stoltz is a good actor who has wandered into the wrong play. Handsome, suave, and genial, he hasn’t a whiff of mischief about him. Dreyfuss’s comic attack is balls-out; Stoltz’s is entirely balls-in. With such a bland partner in crime, the capering Dreyfuss doesn’t have enough to play against, and without traction, especially in Act I, he can’t build sufficient momentum. The second obstacle is the narrative drag of the play itself. Set in San Francisco around the period of the gold rush, most of the first act takes place in Sly’s bedroom, as he lies behind the curtains of his fourposter bed and Simon Able ushers the suckers in and out. To find favor in Sly’s will, a lawyer offers Sly stolen property, a father disowns his son, and, most amusingly, a jealous husband (the droll, bug-eyed Bob Dishy, reprising his role as Mr. Truckle) offers up his voluptuous, pious wife (Elizabeth Berkley). All three ante up in hopes of winning the same prize: the treasure chest that lies at the foot of Sly’s bed. “It serves the delightful double purpose of enriching me while depriving someone else,” Sly observes of his stash of gold. But no number of deft one-liners—“My boy, you could drill into Abner Truckle for a year and never strike decent”—can quite chip away at the weight of visual and structural repetition: the three characters enter through the same door, ask more or less the same question about Sly’s will, and exit having reached more or less the same bargain. It isn’t until a policeman finds Sly with his head up Mrs. Truckle’s skirt as she lights a candle to give thanks for his miraculous recovery that the show suddenly shifts into a looser, giddier, and more surreal rhythm. “I’m an innocent man!” Sly yells above the tumult at the end of the act, as he and Able are hauled off to jail on what appears to be a rape charge. “If I’m not, may this entire city fall to the ground.” There is an ominous rumble and the cast lurches: this is meant to signal the San Francisco earthquake, but it’s really the sight of Gelbart’s comedy taking off.

In Act II, burlesque rules. In a saloon turned courtroom, the players run wild. Released from the fetters of Sly’s masquerade (“too weak” to take the stand, Sly appears in court only as a lump in a bed that is wheeled in), Dreyfuss dons whiskers and long hair—looking for all the world like Yosemite Sam—to double as the Honorable Thunder Bastardson. Alternately gnawing his gavel and banging it, he swaggers around the stage spouting ludicrous commands (“I object to your interruption and my objection is sustained!”) and lewd innuendos (“They don’t call me the ‘Hangin’ Judge’ just because I’m well built!”). As the corrupt lawyer whose inheritance hangs in the balance, Pinchot skitters around the stage in a fustian flurry. He is a preposterous cartoon who achieves full silly-osity when trying to roll the word “prowesslessness” off his thick tongue: “Prowesh-lesh-nesh,” he says. In this crazy court, the Chief of Police looks at the prim Mrs. Truckle and admits to the judge, “There was no sex act to be seen anywhere. Which is pretty much the way my luck’s running lately.” Later, after Mrs. Truckle confesses that she touched Sly first, the Chief, a whirlwind of repressed desire, throws himself at her feet, ripping off his jacket to expose his bare chest. “Touch me! Someplace! Any place on my flesh,” he cries. The outburst—“I was carried away, Your Honor. My wife died yesterday and it’s been hell”—earns him a severe dressing-down from Bastardson. “I’m fining you one month’s graft,” he says.

In the original play, Volpone went to jail. Nowadays, however, we’ve learned to be kinder to our captains of industry. As Able and Sly are about to skip town, Able contrives to swindle his boss. But, since Able’s avidity wasn’t really established in Act I, Stoltz can’t properly bring off this last acid betrayal. The high jinks just aren’t high enough. When Sly is finally dispatched and Able is alone with the booty, he savors a moment of vindictive triumph. Then he opens the chest; it’s empty. Sly’s head pops gleefully into view. “There’s only one way to take it with you, my boy,” he says. “Send it on ahead.” A good con man is always one step ahead of the game, which is why he gets the last laugh; here, the con men in charge of “Sly Fox” are a few steps behind, which is why they don’t.

Among the many things that a con man gets away with, the foremost is trust. The con is a defense against both intimacy and humiliation. Sometimes, however, individuals can con themselves. This is what happens in Daniel Goldfarb’s “Sarah, Sarah” (directed by Mark Nelson at the Manhattan Theatre Club) to the overbearing Eastern European émigrée Sarah Grosberg (J. Smith-Cameron), who invites her son’s eighteen-year-old fiancée, Rochelle (Lori Prince), to tea at her modest petit-bourgeois apartment, intending to scupper the engagement. “I want Artie to marry up,” she says. “To a good family, with a history even.” Sarah carries out her ploy under the nose of her longtime friend and maid, Vincent (the expert Richard Masur), a Stalinist transvestite who wears a brush mustache and a housedress, and weighs in at two hundred and thirty pounds. Vincent’s kink—Masur plays it straight, without a hint of camp—doesn’t embarrass Sarah; in fact, she gives him lingerie for his birthday. But on the subject of her son’s future she’s inflexible. Still, when Vincent intercedes on the young lovers’ behalf by letting it be known that Sarah herself lacks pedigree—she is an orphan from Siberia—the exposure unmoors her. Sarah’s cruel work is intended not to make a better future for her son but to hide her own past. “I am so ashamed,” she cries, once her secret is out. “I am nothing.”

The second act, which casts the same actors in different roles, forty years on, shows Artie, now Arthur (Masur), accompanying his thirty-nine-year-old daughter, Jeannie (Smith-Cameron), to China, in order to take possession of her adopted daughter, whom she has named after Sarah. Goldfarb, who teeters on the sentimental, engineers some gentle, well-wrought ironies here. Arthur is now the one who wrestles with humiliation and who, when he fears that the baby may be brain-damaged, makes his own awful proposals. As Arthur did in the first act, Jeannie stands her ground and keeps the baby, who—this being commercial entertainment—turns out to be healthy. The shame of the last generation is healed by the embrace of the new one. Holding Sarah at the Great Wall of China, with Siberia just over the horizon, Jeannie asks her father what he thinks the baby is thinking. “ ‘I used to be a Chinese orphan, now I’m a rich Jew. Yay!’ ” Arthur says. ♦

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